Níngxiāng

In the hills of western Níngxiāng, on Mount Wéi, stood Mìyìn Temple, founded in 807 and revered as the ancestral seat of the Guīyǎng school of Chan Buddhism. Fire was its constant enemy: it burned in 1370, when its Hall of Ten Thousand Buddhas had to be rebuilt, and again in 1619. Restored in 1655, it passed to the Línjì school, and in 1733 the Yōngzhèng emperor took the recorded sayings of its founder, Língyòu, into the imperial edition of the Buddhist canon and wrote a preface for them himself.